I just read today that Shia LaBeouf was named by Forbes magazine as the top actor to give studios the best return on their investment. This calculation was based on LaBeouf having the good fortune of starring or co-starring in a number of Hollywood blockbusters or sequels, among them last year’s Transformers: Revenge of the [...]
Tomorrow night the Venice Film Festival kicks off the opening of the event with the world premeire of Black Swan, Darren Aronfsky’s genre thriller about a ballerina (Natalie Portman) caught up in intrigue and madness while preparing for a role. Aronofsky is a genius and I’m SO looking forward to seeing this movie once it [...]
Last week, the Film Society of Lincoln Center at the Walter Reade theater kicked off its weeklong film festival celebrating the works of the late French director Eric Rohmer. Known for his thoughtful, stylishly restrained films focusing on relationships, in all their minutely detailed permutations, Rohmer, who died earlier this year at 89, was a [...]
Very funny and odd news from Hollyweird today. AMPAS voted to give the legendary French film director Jean Luc-Godard (Breathless) an honorary Oscar for their special ceremony in November. Great. But there’s only one problem: Monsieur Godard is missing, nowhere to be found. Or rather AMPAS can’t track him down. Maybe he just doesn’t want [...]
Black Swan, the eagerly anticipated Darren Aronofsky (The Wrestler) film about a veteran ballerina (Natalie Portman) competing with a rival dancer (Mila Kunis) has just debuted online. As a big ballet fan, I’m SOOO looking forward to seeing this movie, which will be playing at both the Venice and Toronto Film Festivals this fall. I’ve [...]
I’ve always liked him; I even suffered through the god-awful stage-to-film adaptation of The Chorus Line for him. With this news, he’s obviously won’t be doing promotion for Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps, which opens September 24 (and which yours truly is waiting to see with great anticipation). This certainly hasn’t been a good [...]
There’s an moment in the newly released film Eat Pray Love, based on Elizabeth Gilbert’s best-selling memoir of the same name, which stars Julia Roberts and is directed by Ryan Murphy (Glee) that I was reminded of the late 1970s film An Unmarried Woman that starred Jill Clayburgh and was directed by Paul Mazursky. In [...]
The review is coming tomorrow am and…sigh…Julia Roberts didn’t annoy as much as she has the past few years.
I’ll be back posting Thursday/Friday. My next review–Eat Pray Love! And a new Chick Flick Guy Spotlight. (You’ll be surprised).
It would be very easy to dismiss Cairo Time, a new movie directed and written by Ruba Nadda and starring Patricia Clarkson, as a travelogue given its many wide shots of Egyptian landscape. But it would be disingenuous, if not impossible, to film this story about Juliette, a married American magazine journalist in her early [...]